


In Happy Agony, We Sing

by Zigzagwanderer



Series: And The Wanting Comes In Waves [4]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - After College/University, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Historical evils perpetrated by Matthew Brown, Lingerie, Murdering, Porn, Wedding, intense feelings of love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-22
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-01 04:39:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15766782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zigzagwanderer/pseuds/Zigzagwanderer
Summary: Just wanted to dedicate this to everyone. This entire fandom redefines family.(special shoutout to my very kind regular readers, you are the entire reason I keep posting. Just so you know how much i love you.) New friends always welcome too.Professor H Lecter has taken his catatonic sister Mischa to Crete for respite care, whilst he edits a book. Bill Graham, the Professor's former student and now lover, has gone too. In the previous story, there was a proposal.(sorry-this has now stretched to five chapters and has become a bit darker-all my fault, I apologise)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Hannibalsimago](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hannibalsimago/gifts).



They do not intend to use the chapel for the ceremony. 

Hannibal would slay God, if he could still find him, and Bill has his own rituals; he fucks Hannibal before they even leave the villa for the convent. 

They have time. 

They leave the door wide open to the moon, and blow the candles out. 

Bill kisses Hannibal’s back, the inside of his wrists fused to Hannibal’s hips. He blesses Hannibal with his teeth. Flattens his tongue to sop up the blood. Points the tip. Pushes into the puncture. 

And, as his fingers smear halos across them both, in all of Hannibal’s dark and secret colours, Bill knows.

He knows that before he and Hannibal were made, that they were this thing, this one, sacred thing, a swirl of matter together somewhere, atoms spinning together somewhere, all as one, in the great dark. 

Only chance has divided them into the inconvenience of different limbs, different heartbeats, different thoughts, and it is a random, excruciating separateness that Bill will spend the rest of his life trying to kill.

Bill fucks Hannibal onto him, and the scent of them grows stronger, more animal, and it answers back the cold minerality of the coastal winds. And Bill’s body weeps into Hannibal’s body, weeping at the beauty of their supposed sin. 

Then, panting prayers, Bill kneels. Licking at his own mouth and at Hannibal’s body; and his mouth takes it all, he is a vessel for it all, all of it allowed and none of it forbidden, none of it evil and all of it good, all of it ambrosia and none of it dung.

“Marry me, marry me, want to be yours.” Bill begs, around Hannibal’s cock. “Have to be. Always. Marry me now.” 

“I will.” Hannibal tells him, until mass must surely be over, down there, where the nuns tend their broken flowers.

And the world is sated, yet expectant. 

Bill and Hannibal bathe, and stare at each other, and kiss.

Hannibal has a gift; he lifts the box down and shakes the grains of lavender out onto their stone floor. 

The straps are white silk ribbons, the trim at collarbone and thigh is white cotton lace. 

And the batiste is so fine, that it is as powdered sugar upon Bill’s skin; Hannibal touches that which is already so sweet to him, that which he can see through the gauzy cloth. He touches nipples and cock, strokes the damp down between Bill’s legs, until his hands tremble and he stops. Pulls the rough sweater over Bill’s head, dressing him warmly for the walk along the rocky path.

Bill’s curls rub dry into petals. 

“How heaven and hell must despise me,” Hannibal says quietly, as the night steps in, cloudy and dripping, from the sea, “they have none so divine as you.”

Bill covers Hannibal’s wounds and buttons up his shirt. “If you are hated, then I will be too,” he promises. “Let's go, and be damned together.”


	2. Chapter 2

The mist scumbles along the ragged coastline, and slows them down. 

As does all the kissing. And touching. Bill would rather fall off the cliff edge than let go of Hannibal, even for a moment, and so, the fractured, foam-flecked track is tricky, conjoined as they are.

But Hannibal smiles at him like a boy out on an adventure, every time they skid and misstep, and so he laughs back, amused at the absurdity of them dying. Ever.

By the time they arrive, and are allowed in, Lauds is but a wedding away. 

The cloisters are empty, save for the convent’s communal, sighing soul; the eternal echo of orisons, the even exhalations as the constant sleepers sleep, Mischa among them.

They go to her room. Bill tucks his precious sister-to-be into a wheeled chair, and they take her over to the fog-wet window.

Bill reads to her, talks to her, every day, sometimes with Hannibal, sometimes about him. Her hair brushes out much the same colour as her brother’s, and when they all get back home, Bill will buy ribbon for them, for beloved and beloved, and he will thread it through the silken, chestnut-brown gold of them both.

“I want to say everything,” Hannibal finds the cotton beneath the wool, at Bill's waist, with his fingertips.

“We already say everything,” Bill cannot stand apart from Hannibal, even for this, so he shuffles further forward, and rests his head, to hear the heart. 

Hannibal Lecter and William Graham have no rings. No priest.  
But they have their witness.  


And they have their vows; they have _The Chapel Cycle_ open, to poem vi, in memory, in the non-space that is between them. 

And Bill thinks; these are the words that wondered.  
These are the words that wooed, when I just couldn't.  
And now, these are the words that will wed them. 

“’The gown of you,  
The sheen along your arm.  
Draped on bone. The sheen of it,  
the fibre, the vein.  
Wear nothing but me.  
Surplice of desire,  
cover my body. The rip of it,  
the stitch, the shroud.’”

It is proclamation, plea and promise. 

And, it is done.

There is more kissing. Of course; for it will never be enough. 

Hannibal will file the necessary paperwork when he returns to college. Bill has teased out of him that he has some of the documentation in his desk drawer already. Sheer idle curiosity on Hannibal's part, apparently. The forms date-stamped from not long after they met.

“Oh, shit. Sorry.” There is a clatter and a spilling of water as a cleaning cart grumbles through the plain wooden door. The night orderly shrugs and reverses back out. "I just started here, ok? Didn't know these coma people even had fucking visitors." 

And Billy-boy cannot blush. Not tonight. Tonight, he wants it, wants to be seen as possessed, wants to be paraded.

But Hannibal is holding him too tightly.

“Hey. Hey,” Bill doesn’t mind the constriction. At all. “It’s ok. He’s just the new guy. The janitor…”

“He is not just anything, Bill. That was Matthew Brown.”

“What? Here? How?”

Hannibal is staring at Mischa. At her slight, perpetual smile, that people find so tranquil, but that Hannibal has told Bill is nothing more than an arrested scream. He has told Bill all about Matthew Brown. 

About the one who forced silence into his sister.

“Bill, I am so sorry,” Hannibal lets Bill go, a little.

“S-sorry?”

“You know that I am going to have to kill him. For what he did. With these two hands with which I worship you. With which I hold you down, when I make you come. My own, my sweet, clever angel. Can you forgive me, for what you know I must do?”

And the lamplight burns yellow. And there is rage. And hatred. And Bill has never known such beauty; implacable and pure, there is almost no humanity in it, almost no horror; Hannibal’s eyes are clear, and bright, and holy.

And Billy-boy has never wanted his husband more.


	3. Chapter 3

To be with someone you love. It is a joy.  
To pleasure the one you love, is a joy.

And to kill the thing they hate, must be the greatest joy of all. 

 

Bill packs up the rented villa. Hannibal’s luggage possesses both pedigree and narrative, while Billy-boy’s own workhorse of a holdall is skewbald from where he ripped off the police service badges, the dishonouring done without ceremony or anaesthetic, a falling-in-love ago. 

But now, old blue serge is tangled up in white cotton, spread conjugally between both leather and canvas; and Bill sighs and slips his fingers across the open armoire of his body, across the buttons and seams of himself, for he has been promised stitched petals, and waterfalls of frail, chained silks, and he can scarcely imagine the wonder of these things, interwoven as they will be, amongst Hannibal’s own, more modest wardrobing. 

Hannibal tidies up the rented office. Bill pictures him, extinguishing the brass lamp, stacking the desk-squared books away, bringing the biography to completion. Bill has it in him to be jealous of it; this thing that has shared Hannibal’s sure, sensitive touch all summer, and he could have asked that the book be burnt at Hymen’s altar.  
But, then, why would he? When he is, for once, so sure of his own godhead? 

And he grins from the rough wooden doorway, as his husband walks up the coastal path, so shy and proud and full-paged with settled words. 

Bill puts down his spade and holds out his dirty hands. He has flowers for his teacher’s hair, cliffside flowers that he does not know the name of, but which grow victoriously up through the salt and dust whether they are summoned forth or not. 

“Mischa is safely dreaming her way through the clouds. And I have our tickets here,” Hannibal is crowned, and cloaked in Bill. “I am afraid that I have been high-handed.”  
“First class? Well, seeing as we’re taking our honeymoon back home, in bed...”  
“Indeed. And I see that you have a present for me to unwrap?”  
“Uh huh. Come inside,” Billy-boy smiles, and untucks, and brushes away the falling seeds and root-shed sand from Hannibal’s shirt. “Maybe you should shut the door? "

 

And the day lies down, wearily, gladly, the bright, transient nickel of it worn through to the enduring gold beneath.

“Please allow me to ask Margot and her girlfriend to dinner, at least. If you do not wish for a lavish reception, then an informal meal, to celebrate?”  
Hannibal is reasonable. Shy again, and proud, again. Of what they have. 

And Bill is scrunched tight against the wall, his forehead writing damp declarations in the plaster. He tracks time by the wetness between his legs, by the shadows their carven Christ casts, thrown, lengthening prayers changing direction as the bliss blurs him towards beatification.  
“Invite Tony,” Billy-boy breathes out, bracing himself further apart. “After we’ve marked all the furniture. I want him to see the stains we make.”  
Hannibal tuts, fondly, but does not look up from his work. He merely uses the flat of his palm, once, twice; the sound splitting the trapped heat of the bedroom. And then his tongue. And then, turning Bill around, his throat.  
“Sweet, wicked boy,” Hannibal admonishes Bill, mildly, adoringly, and stands, and begins to take down those boring professorial trousers.

They pay no heed to Matthew Brown, Hannibal’s wedding gift from Bill, who watches from his nest of rope in the corner.


	4. Chapter 4

It gets dark. 

While they heat up the bathwater, Bill mentions an article on dissonance he read in the Quarterly Poetry Journal. 

He might have done so just to hear Hannibal quote Whitman, and, as the recited eagles grapple between them in the lamplight, beak on beak, winged in dallying gold, the tearing vigour of it sends them back up against the wall. 

Afterwards, they put on some sweaters and shorts that Bill thought could be spared to spoil. 

And they remember to check on their captive; neither one of them is good at knots. It has been a joke between them all summer long.

But Matthew Brown, or whoever the demon inside him really is, has been pricked and pricked again, courtesy of his own bagful of doctored barbiturates. He simply stares, and Bill wonders if he presumes to recognise, in the twining scent of them, the twinning dilations of the two strangers that hold him, a taste of his own needs, yet filtered through something fiercer than the vanities of hell.

Utensils rattle from the kitchen drawer. 

“Fate put this fugitive before me,” Hannibal affirms, unable to keep his attention on their prisoner while Bill is biting his thumb that way, whilst choosing between sharp things. “But your kindness, my angel, in helping out at the convent; that has allowed us this miracle.”

“Taking him was actually pretty easy.” Bill reddens, but happily. “The nuns hadn’t even changed the door codes I set them up with. It was like I was just part of a history, already written down.”

For they are the heroes here, so how can they fail?

“Then let this too be a part of the tale.” Hannibal fetches paperwork. It has not been tied with red ribbon, but with workaday string that Bill recognises from Hannibal’s desk. “It is Mischa.”

And so it is; Bill is now also ward to Hannibal’s sleeping sister; bound by law and love. Fathers and daughter, husbands and brothers. 

Bill kisses Hannibal and helps drag the janitor outside, near to the hole in the ground. They are clumsy over the portage, if not the kissing. An altar falls across them from the open door of the villa, across the wind-cracked tiles of turf, and in this illumination, they stop. 

“Itinerant worker,” Bill shrugs. In his experience, such people are not searched for. “Fake name. He’s practically disappeared already.”

They kneel in front of the man that hurt Mischa, and others like her. Who got away from judgement then, but not now. 

“Listen. You want the hospital doctor. Not me.” Matthew Brown gurgles over the gag. The contortions have twisted it off. “Like you said, security doors got codes, right? He had them. I was just an orderly there." 

Bill stills Hannibal’s arm.

“Sick fucker got me in. Said the patients were always sedated, from their surgery. Wanted to watch…”

“Enough.” Hannibal sticks a fork into a leg. Its tines are off-kilter, as if antlers plucked from some tiny, crooked beast; it needs a push or two to go all the way in. 

Billy-boy watches the blood, flowing into the dirt. Like blots on the police psych exams. Those traitorous smudges and swirls. 

Only now, Billy-boy can give tongue to the poetry of it, if he so pleases; he can tell Hannibal that blood does not drip; it blooms. It does not spatter; it spangles.  
And blood does not just fly, and converge; it dances, and drums. It sings and it shapes the world.

He helps see to it that Matthew Brown is paying proper attention, and the Professor pauses in his lecture on degrees of sedation, on trauma and trust, to brush back his husband’s curls.

Amid the screaming, they discern an offer. Mercy, in exchange for details of Matthew's mentor. Release, in exchange for a description. 

Bill turns his head to find that Hannibal has sat back on his heels, considering. He has touched his glasses, and the tape holding them together is ruined. His mouth is soft and sorrowful.

“Guess we should get this new information from him and let him go,” Bill says, slowly, and sighs.


	5. Chapter 5

Bill eases out the cutlery. 

“Please,” he speaks quietly. “Tell us what you can about the doctor guy? Then you can leave. I promise. We won’t need you, if we have him.”

The violence ebbs. It ripples right off Bill’s face. And Matthew Brown blinks into the tide-pool left behind, its true depths obscured by knots of breeze-brisk weed, by loveliness, by skin-smoothing white and amber. He mutters towards its sweet surface, in the end, and confesses to it, and betrays as best he can.

“Baubas.” Hannibal roams, restless, outside of the light. “A nameless shadow.”

But Bill just kisses his husband close again; he knows all about _research_ , about picking over the fruitful carcase of public information, about ways of finding things out that Hannibal’s dear friend Freddie Lounds wouldn’t dirty her claws with. 

When they get back, Billy-boy can start hunting. 

He has to get more hours at the book-store, for his dignity’s sake, and Hannibal has places he wants them to visit. And of course, there is Mischa to care for, but Bill is certain he can give Hannibal this, too. 

He is certain he can give Hannibal _everything_. 

“So…” It is pain, hissing through teeth. The ropes convulse, testing, testing. Matthew Brown spits into the juniper. “You like, gonna set me free, like now?”

Hannibal and Bill stop considering one another for a moment and turn their heads.   
Impatient is the viper in his coils. 

“Oh yeah. Absolutely.” Billy-boy grins, and puts the fork back in.

Only this time, somewhere else.   
There is quite the mess, what with all the thrashing about.

“My sweet, clever boy,” Hannibal murmurs, lamp-coppered cheek against Bill’s mercurial brow. “You are endless, my love, my heart.”   
“I want you to do the cutting.” Bill takes Hannibal’s sweater off and mouths along his husband’s warm chest, his collarbone, his throat. “Like in the kitchen. You’re so beautiful, when you push it in. I want to watch your hands.”

And Bill melts around Hannibal’s waist. Holds on.   
The motion of muscle is a rolling one, the swelling rise of Hannibal, the downstroke and chop, the waves of fury are like the long pulses of them making love.

It is drowning. Red spume against their skin. Salt and salt and salt. 

And it goes on until there is there is only an alluvium of evil left, a rich residue with which to feed the untamed hillside. For Hannibal has used the roughest blade they own, kept, perversely, for its lacework of rust, its pretty tarnish, its blunt beauty. 

Safe to say it has been one of Hannibal’s less precise butcheries.  
The head judders away, awkwardly, into the pit. 

And Hannibal is panting, hard, with the work of it.   
Bill shivers. All the sounds that Hannibal makes are Bill’s favourite sounds, but this one he puts away in a reliquary that is gold on all sides, soldered with desire. 

“Remember when you first touched me?” Bill says, as if were a year ago. A century. An eon. As if they had seeded the seas themselves upon that very night. “Here? Between my legs?”   
“Of course.” Hannibal pushes his glasses off his face with his forearm. “I was terribly afraid.” He saws at Bill’s clothing. “I wanted so badly to make you happy.”   
“God. You did. You do. You always will.” Bill leans up into Hannibal’s mouth. “It had all been nothing, up until then. I was nothing, up until then. You brought me into joy, into life. You gave me what life is. What joy is. When you touched me.” 

Hannibal strips Bill. Loosens himself. “You lay, naked, like this, beneath me.” He runs blood in a line. The metal is cold. But then so is the wind, the stone step, the water beneath the bluff. “Hip. Hollow. Hair. I prayed, Bill, I actually prayed, that you would never leave my bed.”  
“God. Yes. And you put your hand around me.”  
Hannibal allows the mean old carver to slide, wetly, out of his grip, and onto the sand. “And yours around me.” 

They tremble their bodies together, all over again.   
All over again, they conceive of their creed, where wonder and need overcome disbelief and unworthiness. It is the chance taken, all over again, again and again, with every breath, that there is glory in the world, that the ineffable will reach back towards you. It is the worship of love itself.

And again, Bill asks Hannibal if they can fuck a little faster.  
And again, Hannibal sparkles and shakes his head.

But this time, Billy-boy goddamn _smiles_ as he comes.   
As Hannibal comes.   
At the sweat and blood and bone-deep peace of it. 

The light burns out inside the villa, untended, and they lie, scratched by the charcoal dashes of the grass. Hannibal kisses Bill’s belly and breast. In between these, he taps at a rib.

“Did you eat today?” Hannibal frowns. “While I was away?”  
“Didn’t have time to fish. Damn ground was like iron. Had some olives.” Bill’s voice is slowing; he is curling towards a dream in Hannibal’s arms.  
The arms enclose, then haul him up. “Hmm. I will feed you myself.” Hannibal pushes Bill towards their open door. “Bathe and dress and get a blanket.”  
“I gave all our scraps to the falcon chicks,” Bill yawns and shudders from the tacky cold. “What will you cook?”

There is ragged mountain thyme but a step away. They are never, ever, without oil.

Hannibal glances, with a culinary eye, towards the hole in the ground. “ _‘Flowed that juice/never tasted before, such fruits/which that unknown orchard bore/we’ll suck until our lips are sore…’_ ”   
“Oh?” And Hannibal recognises Bill’s sudden, sharpening interest, from lectures, from tutorials, from their bedroom. “Rossetti, am I right?”  
“Yes. It was once one of Mischa’s favourites.”  
“I’ll read it to her just as soon as we get home,” Bill laughs, knowing that his sister-daughter will appreciate the new appropriation, in the way that close families enjoy their little, private jokes.   
“But for now, Professor,” Bill takes his teacher’s palm, and puts himself into it, keen, and bright, and narrow; most beloved blade of all. “What do you think? Shall we begin with the heart?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, the fic and series are done! Thanks for going with it!xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxhugsxxxxxxxxxxx


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